Sustainable licensing at Element with AGPL
As you know, Element’s commitment to the growth of Matrix, both as an open standard protocol and a genuine open source project, is unquestionable, and we’re proud to continue powering the development of Matrix 2.0 via our contributions to the various projects.
Since announcing our shift to use the Affero GNU Public License (AGPLv3) for the development of the Synapse Matrix homeserver and related projects in December 2023, we’ve kept up the same 2-week release cadence for Synapse as we’ve had since 2016, with 18 releases now under AGPL (with as many external contributions as ever) – covering all the prep work for Matrix 2.0, including all the foundations for Native Sliding Sync and Native OIDC. Meanwhile, Matrix keeps thriving and growing, and Element has found a niche building critical public sector Matrix deployments as a path to funding underlying Matrix dev.
As we’ve highlighted before, we’ve chosen to switch our development to AGPL now that the wide scale public sector use of Matrix has attracted the attention of huge system integrators and similar. AGPL ensures that as they create, sell and profit from professionalised Matrix-based solutions – with all the corporate bells and whistles – they also help fund the future development of Matrix. This is either by contributing their changes back to the project as open source, or by buying an AGPL-alternative licence from Element.
